But maybe you can help me out on the last bit. What term do you prefer to characterize a position that denies basic science? I will be happy to use it. This one just seems to be the most accurate.

"Skeptic" does not seem accurate to me because real skeptics (which all scientists are, of course) are skeptical about all positions until they hold up to scientific inquiry, as AGW has done now for years. They only seem to be 'skeptical' of the conclusion of far better trained and informed skeptics--climate scientists--while being not at all skeptical of the utter nonsense put out by such sites as WUWT.

Also, I am curious: do you equally chide folks who use terms like 'AGW fanboys'? If not, do you see a problem there?

Thanks, as always for all your great work here, by the way.

Yes I do chide all sides from time to time, however the frequency of insults is not a balanced equation so some would see chastisement as only going one way.

To answer your query about terminology, why is it necessary to use the terms fanboy-denier-skeptic at all? There is no need to characterize the opponent, let their own words do that for them.

Insults, no matter whom they are issued by nor whom the recipient is are an attempt to shape the readers opinions about the other party through insulting or demeaning them. You are a well educated adult, surely you can fully counter any fact based logical fallacy without resorting to name calling?

I am not claiming perfection in this regard, I too get frustrated and occasionally slip into such responses, but after your logical science based defense to slip into such at the end of the statement is counter productive, especially if your goal is to convince the layperson reading your statement.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Just for the record, I have never denied any absorption spectra. I even remember the absorption spectra experiment in JHS which must have been about 1964-1965. But because you have a single variable that should indicate a positive trend is a far cry from manking a case that AGW is real, or having a confirmed simulation of Earth's climate.

If you are familiar with a working climate model, which has been through the wringer of peer review, then link to it, and we will plug in the online data and do the numbers together. Then if the predicted temperatures match recorded temperatures, even for only the last 2-3 decades, we can confirm it.

The model must be proved to be accurate before the results can be trusted. As I have said, I personally have never found a working climate model. They have always had problems with massaged data, "corrected temperatures", "compensation for the urban heat island effect", a whole litany of excuses and criticisms. All that the best of them has ever done is display limited accuracy over a limited time period, typical of a simulation of inadequate complexity. A working model would allow us to crank in the last half million years of carbon dioxide levels in the ice cores and compare those to the paleotemperatures derived from the Oxygen 18 radioisotopes in those same samples.

I think the big problem with virtually all climate models is that they treat the solar output as a constant, which is the problem I identified most recently in this thread. The most I have ever seen in a climate model is a single variable for solar output which compensates for the 11-year sunspot cycle. The Sun is just way more complicated than that, because solar output also lacks a working simulation that will reliably and consistently predict the observed output of that closest of variable stars.

When everything has been checked, rechecked, double and triple checked... What do you say? The climate argument simply gets stronger every year, but the problem really is that it was good enough 25 years ago to justify action.

Squilliam, just out of curiousity, what "action" would you take? Here in the US, the EPA cracked down on coal power plant emissions, which is probably illegal, yet I hate coal and approve. They also screwed the CAFE standards so tight that we are having trouble meeting them with new cars. Then they cracked down on diesel emissions, and consumers have to pour DEF (a urea chemical) into their trucks, much to their annoyance, and VW was caught cheating.

In spite of it all, our oil consumption is still at a record high level, and all the coal we can dig is either burned here or in China. Whether our government is controlled by Liberal Democrats mouthing words they don't believe, or Conservative Republicans telling no lies, the government has not stopped or even reduced carbon emissions.

KaiserJeep wrote:...and driven the fools into full retreat multiple times.

Oh, please. Even more delusional than I thought.

“If I was just intelligent, I’d be okay. But I am fiercely intelligent, which most people find very threatening.” —Actress Sharon Stone

“People the world over recognize me as a great spiritual leader.” —Actor Steven Seagal

Do conspicuously gifted people—people who are prodigiously and undeniably skilled—go around boasting of their abilities? I can understand them occasionally “showing off” just to confirm or re-establish their creds, but I can’t see them needing to brag about stuff. In other words, it’s hard to imagine Albert Einstein going around telling people that he was “fiercely intelligent.”

There is a phenomenon in psychology called the “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” It’s a theory that was developed, in 1999, by Dr. David Dunning and Dr. Justin Kruger, two Cornell University psychology professors.

Broadly speaking, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is defined as “a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability to recognize their own ineptitude.”

Science AFAIK, never proved anything. However, theories did explain the facts and that is all that matters for science.

Our planet is cooking and that is on the level of a fact AND we have a theory AND we have approximate models.

At this point, that observable fact is completely in line with predicted results, we, in fact, entering the era of severe consequences. Not too surprising considering that the footprint of mankind has now covered the globe. It is not even a surprising result.

I'll not dispute the globe is warming, I never did, because I think it normal. As for the overshoot human population, that is true, too.

The question would be, what do we do now? I have decided to care for my family and adapt to the new conditions. Most of the rest of you favor the "Chicken Little" approach, you want to run around screaming.

Certainly, our politicians are saving themselves, then enriching themselves, and it's doubtful they will ever notice your screams. Better make a new plan.

dohboi wrote:You don't need models. All you need is absorption spectra. The rest is just math.

But you don't like the results of the math, so you have to persist in denying the facts.

If you accept that CO2 and methane (among others) are GHGs, then do you deny that CO2 and methane have increased in their atmospheric concentrations considerably since the late 1800s?

I swear I have seen this "show them the basics" post a million times over the years. These denier punks are not interested in facts. They are posers who pretend that they want to be see the evidence but never raise a finger over the left mouse button to look up any of those facts. Instead they claim that every source other than the denier sources is not valid and politically motivated. And these punks call themselves skeptics. The proper label is fanatics.

KaiserJeep wrote:Squilliam, just out of curiousity, what "action" would you take? Here in the US, the EPA cracked down on coal power plant emissions, which is probably illegal, yet I hate coal and approve. They also screwed the CAFE standards so tight that we are having trouble meeting them with new cars. Then they cracked down on diesel emissions, and consumers have to pour DEF (a urea chemical) into their trucks, much to their annoyance, and VW was caught cheating.

In spite of it all, our oil consumption is still at a record high level, and all the coal we can dig is either burned here or in China. Whether our government is controlled by Liberal Democrats mouthing words they don't believe, or Conservative Republicans telling no lies, the government has not stopped or even reduced carbon emissions.

Edit: Cid, try to keep up, you are way behind.

Honestly the issue is more about zoning, transit orientated development and increasing zero emissions facilities such as cycle lanes with respect to transport. You have a serious deficit in terms of density or relative distance between work, school, shops and home. There are significant problems when you don't get any new development in existing areas, and people have to drive for many miles just to get anywhere. As a bonus if you fixed these problems it would probably help reduce the obesity epidemic and perhaps significantly improve the quality of life for a lot of people because they wouldn't pay out their nose for housing, transport and spend more time with their families.

With respect to energy use I don't really know. Your tax system is ridiculous already, so more 'tax credits' would be silly. Perhaps a movement towards a carbon tax that is offset against income tax for home energy consumption with industry being dialled in once there is significant traction towards global emissions reductions. Furthermore I would ring fence land use changes to just the rural sector. The changes in zoning should also make significant headway in terms of home consumption of energy as new houses are significantly lower energy users than older housing stock.

I would again appreciate it if those who think AGW is a hoax (is 'hoaxers' an offensive term to them?) would restrict their comments in that direction to the thread dedicated to that misconception.

But I have to just point out that KJ has admitted that he accepts the very basic science establishing CO2 and methane as greenhouse gasses that cause the atmosphere to warm more the higher their concentration.

He also has just said that he accepts the well established findings, reconfirmed many times and in many ways, that the atmosphere is warming.

So one wonders why it is so hard for him to connect these very clear dots. Does he think that CO2 and methane concentrations have not increased? Is he doubting the numbers so carefully and dutifully recorded by Tanada every day?

Or does he think that the combustion of fossil fuels does not generate CO2 (which is very, very basic chemistry)?

Or does he think it's a hoax that we have been burning massive amounts of fossil fuels for over a century (but especially in the last fifty years or so)?

Again, I would prefer that any answers and any further discussion about doubting the very clear basic science of AGW be restricted to that appropriate thread. Can we take it over there folks, or do we have to make our hosts do the very labor intensive work of moving all this stuff for us? I do believe they have better things to do with their time than clean up those who can't manage to poop on the right pot, to use a lucid turn of phrase!

“Someone should do something. But that someone clearly isn’t going to be the federal government.”Citizens must hold government accountable on climate

By Bill McKibben

...So who’s going to stand up? The answer, for the moment, is states and cities. On Wednesday, the governors of the West Coast states and the mayors of most of its big cities put out a stirring joint message: “We speak as a region of over 50 million people with a combined GDP of $2.8 trillion. There is no question that to act on climate is to act in our best economic interests. Through expanded climate policies, we have grown jobs and expanded our economies while cleaning our air.” They would, the officials promised, keep at it. They added that they hoped other local and regional leaders would “join us in leading and re-affirming our commitment to cut carbon emissions and reverse the damaging impacts to our communities of unfettered pollution.” ...

dohboi, I believe that what warming is occurring is quite natural, and due to changes in insolation, caused by both the Milanković orbital cycles and the variable output of the Sun, which - as has clearly been shown in the fossil records - occasionally causes us to skip either a glacial or an interglacial in the basically quite regular 100,000 year cycle. Skipping the glacial occurs when the peak output of the Sun occurs in step with the peak insolation due to the orbital mechanics identified by Milanković. Skipping the interglacial occurs when both coincide to minimize insolation. This is happening because the unknown and unidentified long term variable solar output has a period that is not quite the same as the (completely predictable and regular as clockwork) Milanković insolation.

Like I said before, the Sun is known to be a 3% variable star, as it is a mainstream G2V spectral type. We know a lot about the short term insolation changes due to the eleven and a fraction year sunspot cycle, but we know little of long term insolation variations, which have only been measurable since the advent of electronic instruments. We can tell that there are at least three factors with three different periods at work, and have identified only the one which is sunspots. That was what I meant when I said that we must model the Sun first, or we will always fail to model the Earth's climate. Unfortunately for us, there are no records of solar insolation on the Earth as there are paleotemperature records in ice cores, tree rings, lakebed sediments, and fossil plants.

When we have instrumentation to explore the Sun, and construct a working model of solar insolation, then and only then will we be able to construct a working model of the Earth's climate. Until then, any Earth climate model that treats the insolation as a constant, or at best only accounts for Milanković orbital variations and the sunspot cycle, is doomed to fail.

In fact, every single climate model built so far by everybody, has failed. They can be tweeked and the data adjusted and constants fiddled with to produce limited accuracy for a limited period, but that's it - none of the climate models work long term.

At this time I repeat, anybody who has knowledge of a working climate model can point me at it and we will review it together. It has been over eight years since I last did that, it requires a lot of effort to do, but I admit that the state of computing has advanced (I have a good grasp of that much), but I doubt that climate modelling under the Obama years was any more advanced than the Bush years. Climate modelling as a means of eeking out a living on the government R&D dole is about to go away anyhow in the Trump administration, if you have anything at all, better tell me before it disappears from the web.

I tell you what I really think. I believe that those of you with the math skills to do such a thing as I describe, never have. I think you read abstracts of online papers and IPCC reports and the like, and never do the math yourselves. I think that all of you have nothing but Faith in the god named Science and the priests in white lab coats.

Insolation has been flat to slightly decreasing over the last few decades while global temp have increased markedly.

One wonders, is there any evidence would shake you apparently steadfast faith (since it does not seem to be supported by any actual evidence that you can site) that human carbon emissions are increasing global temperatures?

It simply boggles my mind that seemingly intelligent people go through life without doing basic arithmatic. YOU just said:

"Insolation has been flat to slightly decreasing over the last few decades while global temp have increased markedly."

Well to begin with, that's half true. Insolation has been decreasing due to orbital mechanics, as per Milanković. Insolation has varied +/- via the known sunspot cycle during that time. And the observation window of a few decades is entirely too short to distinguish the longer periodicity of solar output, which we know is happening because of the fossil record "misses" in a fairly regular glacial/interglacial cycle. But once you factor out both sunspots and Milanković cycles, there are indications of slowly increasing insolation due to the unknown long term variability of the Sun.

We don't have enough data to calculate the periodicity of the variation, we only know that it is on the close order of the same period as the long term Milanković variation.